Brokeback Mountain play, review: Where’s all the gay sex?!
Brokeback Mountain play review and star rating: ★★★
Where was all the spine-tingling intimacy? The kissing scenes that show what two men together can be like, the caressing of a shoulder with the tuft of hair, the chin nuzzling into the armpit, the gazes of adoration?
Brokeback Mountain, originally a 1997 short story published in the New Yorker, became a masterpiece of the big screen in 2005 when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal played two closeted gay lovers who worked on a ranch and fell hopelessly in love. The film is singular in its beauty: it still retains its crown as the most prolific piece of LGBTQ cinema in the modern era. Its first ever theatre staging tackles such an intimate and profound story with mixed success.
There is much to like about director Jonathan Butterell’s vision. He has got the atmosphere absolutely right: it’s hard not to compare this stage version to the film, in which the silences speak louder than the words. In the film, the wide angle shots of the Texan ranches, desolate in their beauty, spoke more about the isolation and removal the two men felt than they could do by speaking. In-the-round at the Soho Place, the stage is an ode to the film version, with the recognisable shrubs and the camp fire amid the wilderness. With a live band serenading the actors, and a wonderful country music soundtrack by Dan Gillespie Sells, there are plenty of moments to get lost in the serene, verdant nature.
It’s a place we’d all like to get lost in, to fall in love in. The show is also powered by two compelling lead performers in Mike Faist, of Spielberg’s West Side Story, and Lucas Hedges from Manchester by the Sea. Faist conveys an adorable, doting Jack whose passion for Ennis, played by Hedges, pops off the stage. Hedges is decently brooding as the traumatised Ennis, the tragic figure who can’t quite love himself enough to let him love another man.
Given the criticisms shows like Disney’s Love, Victor have received for casting straight men in gay roles, it’s a huge surprise there’s been so little pick up in the media about the fact that Faist identifies as straight. Regardless of what you think about straight actors playing gay, it wasn’t that that hampered proceedings.
The duo don’t have the right chemistry to bring the two lovers to life. Laying arm in arm, it all feels too choreographed: I just couldn’t buy that these were two men who were deeply in love. There’s a coldness to the pairing that is neither actor’s fault. The bizarre decision to leave all the moments of passion and intimacy off stage leaves them nothing to work with. The key scene in the story in which the men first kiss, with all of its tempestuousness, isn’t shown; instead we see the outside of a tent as the two get down and dirty inside. How much we all craved to see the tantalising passions of that first kiss. Making the intimacy disappear is more than just bad for the feels, it also feels problematic given a major purpose of LGBTQ drama is surely to platform intimacy to break taboos around seeing people of the same sex together.
Elsewhere, there’s a comedic tone that sometimes works, but most often doesn’t. In the only scene where we see the couple in bed having sex, the tone is promptly lightened by Jack cracking some bad joke that isn’t funny that rips the tension, and chemistry, from beneath our feet.
It feels as though Butterell has tried to mimic the film version with much of the staging but added humour in place of where the intimacy should be. The production reminds me of the Young Vic’s adaptation of Oklahoma! from last year, where the musicians on stage, who occasionally join in with the storytelling, add a meta element to the story. But where Oklahoma made time for deep dives into the characters’ emotions, with scenes that lingered over conversations in real time, Brokeback Mountain feels like it was unable to work out how to stage the essential intimacy, so it just got rid of it.
There are some commendable efforts to reinvent this story for the stage: Paul Hickey is compelling as Older Ennis, forever sitting on the side lines and nostalgically looking at his younger self. But overall this queer coupling feels starved of queer romance.
Brokeback Mountain plays at Soho Place until 12 August
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